Secure, fast, flexible – and no alternative: git turns 20 years old

"I'm an egotistical bastard and name all projects after myself. First 'Linux', now 'git'", says Linus Torvalds about himself. git is British slang for "stubborn people who think they're always right and argue around". Torvalds demonstrated a certain stubbornness when he created git two decades ago, dissatisfied with conventional version control systems. On April 7, 2005, 20 years ago today, he released the first version.

The story of git is a short one. The Linux community used Bitkeeper for version management of the code base, especially the kernel, which discontinued the free version in April 2005. Since Bitkeeper was never open source, it had already been discredited by many developers. However, none of the other code management systems on the market met Torvald's requirements. Like Bitkeeper, the system he wanted was to be a distributed one that did not run via a central repository server. This would have meant a tight bottleneck if many contributors accessed it at the same time and a single source of failure. On the other hand, it should still be version and tamper-proof, efficient – and, of course, open source.

git is created in just four days

Torvalds therefore created such a system himself without further ado, within four days, between April 3 and 7, 2005. 6.7 patches per second were already flowing into the Linux kernel project – on April 29, proving its efficiency. The success of git has continued at a similar rate to this day: In a survey conducted in 2022, 94 percent of all participants said they used git for version control; all other systems are far behind, Bitkeeper no longer exists and competitors such as Google Code have also capitulated.

Many see the reason for the success in the lightweight and flexible tree structure of Torvald's concept, in which developers can quickly derive a branch and just as quickly merge it with the main tree or discard it completely. Each distributed clone maintains its own repo with branches, versions and the option to restore older states.

git does not require a central repository (origin/main) that compiles the development as a whole, but most projects have one, nowadays often in the cloud, for example at GitHub, GitLab or BitBucket. These are based on git, but add further functions such as pipelines, testing and a community. All development environments such as VS Code or JetBrains are now also hardwired with git, so that the somewhat tedious work on the console is no longer necessary. In many cases, only the AI assistant now even writes the commit descriptions.

Torvalds has not maintained git himself for a long time; at the end of June 2005, he placed it in the hands of Junio Hamano, who is still in charge of it today. His most recent release was version 2.49.

Much more information can be found in the git FAQ on kernel.org, from which the quote at the beginning of the article is also taken.

Mastering Gitops 2025

Continuous Delivery is good, Progressive Delivery is better – This is the motto of the Mastering GitOps online conference on April 30, 2025, which is dedicated to the challenges of how both infrastructure and applications can be provided in an automated, consistent and reproducible manner.

The event is aimed at software developers, DevOps engineers and platform teams who take responsibility for ensuring that software is successfully developed and deployed in an agile manner.

Highlights from the program:

• GitOps at all levels: with Crossplane & ArgoCD
• GitOps Evolution: Modern infrastructure pipelines with Pulumi and Argo CD
• Practical report: Two years of GitOps with FluxCD in production
• Efficient multi-tenant architectures: GitOps with Argo CD in practice
• GitOps patterns for distributed deployment pipelines with Kargo

Get your tickets with early bird discount until April 2!

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